ABSTRACT
Prominent and influential writers like Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls have taken the position that no utilitarian account of judicial decision-making, or of moral decision-making in general, can work. A theory of judicial decision will therefore be a theory about moral decisions which gives special attention to the position and power of judges. The investigation becomes a topographic survey of the terrain, an account of what persons happen to do when they make moral or legal judgments, and of whether they happen to agree or disagree. A point to remember about legal and moral reasoning is that people expect decision-makers to act in a disinterested way. Clearly, the theory needs elaboration as an informative account of the standards which underlie moral and legal judgment. In classical Benthamite utilitarianism, the goal of morality is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Richard Wasserstrom's discussion of judicial decision-making is also concerned with the complexity of a judge's moral decisions.
